Back in April Steve Jones wrote up a disaster at work. Andy had one this week and wrote up the story too. Copy cat! Pretty soon everyone will be having a disaster and writing a story about it! Give these guys credit for letting you see what happens when it ALL goes bad. Disaster recovery is hard to sell and hard to do, reading the article might give you an idea that will save you some time and/or data one day.
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SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability.
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In this next article of the SQL Server in the Enterprise Series, we'll explore how to cluster Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 in a step-by-step manner. After this article, you should be able to cluster a SQL Server 2000 machine for failover availability in an Active/Active cluster.
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Learn how to use ALERTs, a SQL Agent job and a stored procedure (SP) to create a copy of your critical database backups on another physical machine as soon as the database backups are created.
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SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability.
Read more...

How many times have you run out of space in a database? What about on a file system? Andy Warren has had this happen a few times, especially when large imports take place. He brings us an article that describes some of the precautions he has taken to prevent this from happening.
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In this next article of the SQL Server in the Enterprise Series, we'll explore how to cluster Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 in a step-by-step manner. After this article, you should be able to cluster a SQL Server 2000 machine for failover availability in an Active/Active cluster.
Read more...

Clustering a SQL Server machine was one of the most frustrating tasks a DBA and Windows administrator had to accomplish in SQL Server 7.0 and Windows NT 4.0. With the maturity of both the OS and the DBMS in Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000, this operation has been simplified tremendously. This first article in the series of article on clustering SQL Server will explain the general architecture of clustering.
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Hurricane Charlie had a pretty substantial impact on residents and businesses in Central Florida. Andy lives in the Orlando area and wrote up some notes on the various challenges he ran into it. Out of it you might find a couple things worth thinking about adding into your DR plan.
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Automating SQL Server tasks is the sign of an experienced DBA. One who doesn't waste time on repetitive tasks that can be easily setup in a job, task, or some other scheduling process to run when they need to run. Haidong Ji has written a number of articles on how to perform automation and brings us yet another technique. This time he looks at managing your backup files, something that we all need to do, but all too often forget to do.
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When transferring a database to a new server, you are bound to experience a user problem. In this article by Neil Boyle, he shows you how to transfer passwords and accounts seamlessly to a new server.
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SQL Server has a great backup and recovery architecture, but you have to know how to properly configure and use the server to ensure that you will not be seeking new employment anytime soon. A few of the Sonasoft team have written this short piece on strategies for setting up your backup jobs to ensure recovery in the event of a disaster. Welcome new authors Bilal Ahmed, Kiran Kumar, and Vas Srinivasan.
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SQL Server high availability. Log shipping or replication, clustering or some other solution. It's a challenge and as companies grow more dependent on their databases, it's one that more and more DBAs face everyday. Paul Ibison has taken a look at how log shipping and replication can be compared in the quest for high availability.
Read more...

Are you prepared to handle a full or partial failure of your AC system? Ever thought about what would happen if it did happen. Once again Andy offers comments on a real world incident. While we'd all like to think it will never happen to us, we think sharing these incidents is a great way to prevent it from happening to others.
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This articles makes the case for using SQL LiteSpeed over other backup solutions and presents some notes about why the DBA should manage backups rather than offloading to network administration.
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Andy had a semi-disaster similar to the one he wrote about last year. Interesting to see the kinds of problems that happen to other people. This article raises some interesting points that are outside the scope of basic disaster recovery, looking at how/when to move databases to a different server and how to reduce the server load dynamically.
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This article analyzes the various options available for your backup and recovery process with SQL Server 2000 as well as an enhancement to your SQL Server backup and recovery process using a highly efficient backup and restore utility that provides significant time and disk space savings called SQL LiteSpeed.
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Are you tired of manually restoring each database on a new server when the original server has a melt down? Does the manual process seem slow, and prone to keystoke and mouse click errors? Would you like to have those restore scripts automatically built, so you only have to fire them off? Well this article will show you one possible method for speeding up and reducing errors will trying to perform a restore of all databases on a server.
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A VBscript class is created that can be used to query the maintenance plans on an SQL server to determine when a backup has occurred. This class can be used with others to create a scripted method for monitoring backups.
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When transferring a database to a new server, you are bound to experience a user problem. In this article by Neil Boyle, he shows you how to transfer passwords and accounts seamlessly to a new server.
Read more...